Dear Reader:

We like to keep in mind that the purpose of electric lighting is to enable human beings to see. While that would seem to be self-evident, as facilities professionals it’s possible for us to focus on optimizing the quantity of light, sometimes at the expense of quality. It’s not uncommon at all for people to come into a due diligence process with the paradigm of ‘more is better’, when in fact people don’t always need or want massive amounts of lumens to work, study, play or relax.

Defining quality with industrial lighting can be multi-faceted, but in all cases – with each metric – if we’re mindful of how each of our decisions affects people, we’ll be much further ahead than we would be otherwise, our employees will appreciate it, and their output will be enhanced as a result of it. Happy, healthy people are productive people.

One of those metrics is known as color temperature. No, in...